ON STAGE. THEATER & MUSIC. THEATER SCENE.

At Court and Lookingglass, everything old is new again

One of the defining features of pop culture today is the phenomenon known as sampling. Old images, themes and icons are constantly being reinterpreted and recombined to uncover something entirely new.

Theater directors, of course, have been reworking familiar plays and well-worn stories for years. Two current productions, performed within a block of each other, illustrate how directors with wildly different sensibilities approach this sort of challenge.

Lookingglass Theatre's staging of "Lookingglass Alice" blends together Lewis Carroll's most popular books, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865) and "Through the Lookingglass" (1872). It can always be a risk to fiddle around with plots and characters that are so ingrained in our collective psyche, so for director David Catlin, it was a matter of "reinventing our perception of things."

At the outset, the show looks just as you'd expect. There is young Alice, with her long yellow hair and aproned dress, poking around a Victorian drawing room. Her creator, Charles Dodgson (who wrote under the penname Lewis Carroll), is there as well--sitting on the other side of a large mirror hanging over the fireplace mantle.

But within minutes, the shrouding black drapery falls to the floor to reveal every square inch of the theater, which Catlin describes as having a "jungle-gym and crazy laboratory feel to it." This is where Alice embarks on her mind-trippy, acrobatic excursions that are more Cirque du Soleil than Walt Disney.

Just east of Lookingglass, Court Theatre's production of "Quartet"--playwright Heiner Muller's compressed version of the French novel, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (1782)--finishes out its run at the Museum of Contemporary Art in a polarizing and highly unexpected production staged by JoAnne Akalaitis.

Two films from the late 1980s--Stephen Frears' "Dangerous Liaisons" starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich, and Milos Foreman's "Valmont" starring Annette Bening and Colin Firth--helped ensure the staying power of this story, which focuses on the sexual machinations of the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont. As did 1999's "Cruel Intentions," an MTV generation interpretation set in the world of bored, rich society kids.

"I liked the movies a lot," Akalaitis says. "But I didn't look at them again. The play seems so distant from the films."

Muller's script, which contains no stage directions whatsoever, gave Akalaitis a lot of freedom. "A play like this basically says you can do anything you want," she says. "It's a difficult play to stage. The language is opaque and extremely poetic at the same time. There's no talk of anyone's past or anyone's family or future or relationships. They exist in a kind of hermetic void."

Here the void manifests itself as a cheap motel room with two beds and a closet, but no telephone, television or doors. The actors are completely cut off from life outside the room.

"For me, [staying in a motel] is like being in Las Vegas or a hospital room," Akalaitis says. "It's totally dislocating, where you have no sense of time and you are totally lonely. You could be anyplace but you really are no place."

Both directors use meta-theatrics. Although not overtly stated, the entire premise of this "Quartet" seems based on the notion that Merteuil and Valmont are actually a pair of touring actors on a pit stop somewhere near Houston. Locked in a motel room with a closet full of costumes, it appears as though they are staving off the drudgery by playacting a ritualized version of what they perform on stage every night.

And in "Lookingglass Alice," we hear the miked stage manager instruct the cast--"Cue the rabbit"--and later see Dodgson himself waving from the stage manager's booth, silently manipulating the action down below.

"This is a very modern take that stays true to the spirit of Carroll," says Catlin.

So it's no surprise that the show also samples from other genres--hip-hop in particular. Tweedledum and Tweedledee appear in slouchy shorts and sideways baseball caps that read "DEE" and "DUM." They propel Alice into a series of old-school dance moves like the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch.

And why not?

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"Quartet" continues through Sunday at the MCA, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; 773-753-4472. "Lookingglass Alice" continues through March 27 at the Lookingglass Theatre in the Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave; 312-337-0665.